Adeept Motor Shield Introduction

August 15, 2018 By Adeept 4,612

Overview

Based on the L298 , the Adeept Motor Shield is a dual full-bridge driver designed to drive inductive loads such as relays, solenoids, DC and stepping motors. It allows you to drive two DC motors with your Arduino board and controll the speed and direction of each one independently. You can also measure the motor current absorption of each motor among other features. External expansion has two steering gear interface and wireless communication interface, which can be installed both the NRF24L01 communication module and the @Bluetooth communication module.

The shield is compatible to Arduino Kit, which means you can quickly create projects by plugging Arduino modules to the board. All IO pins are extended to facilitate the development needs of users. Also we provide a complete schematic and reference routines. If you encounter any problems, we will be here and work with you. Just use our products to make a more interesting exploration!

Power
The Arduino Motor Shield must be powered only by an external power supply. Because the L298 IC mounted on the shield has two separate power connections, one for the logic and one for the motor supply driver. The required motor current often exceeds the maximum USB current rating.
External (non-USB) power can come either from an AC-to-DC adapter (wall-wart) or battery. The adapter can be connected by plugging a 2.1mm center-positive plug into the Arduino’s board power jack on which the motor shield is mounted or by connecting the wires that lead the power supply to the Vin and GND screw terminals.
To avoid possible damage to the Arduino board on which the shield is mounted, we reccomend using an external power supply that provides a voltage between 7 and 12V. If your motor require more than 9V we recommend that you separate the power lines of the shield and the Arduino board, which is possible through cutting the “Vin Connect” jumper placed on the back side of the shield. The absolute limit for the Vin at the screw terminals is 18V.
The power pins are as follows:
The Vin on the screw terminal block is the input voltage to the motor connected to the shield. An external power supply connected to this pin also provide power to the Arduino board. By cutting the “Vin Connect” jumper you make it a dedicated power line for the motor.
GND Ground on the screw terminal block.

Input and Output

This shield has two separate channels, called A and B, that each use 4 of the Arduino pins to drive or sense the motor. In total there are 6 pins in use on this shield. You can use each channel separately to drive two DC motors or combine them to drive one bipolar stepper motor. The shield’s pins divided by channel are shown in the table below:

Motors Connection
Brushed DC motor. You can drive two Brushed DC motors by connecting the two wires of each one in the (+) and (-) screw terminals for each channel, A and B. In this way you can control its direction by setting HIGH or LOW of the DIR A and DIR B pins, and the speed by varying the PWM A and PWM B duty cycle values. The Brake A and Brake B pins, if set HIGH, will effectively brake the DC motors rather than let them slow down by cutting the power. You can measure the current going through the DC motor by reading the SNS0 and SNS1 pins. On each channel will be a voltage proportional to the measured current, which can be read as a normal @analog input, through the function @analogRead() on the @analog input A0 and A1. For your convenience it is calibrated to be 3.3V when the channel is delivering its maximum possible current, that is 2A.

Physical Characteristics
The maximum length and width of the Motor Shield PCB are 2.7 and 2.1 inches respectively. Four screw holes allow the board to be attached to a surface or case. Note that the distance between digital pins 7 and 8 is 160 mil (0.16″), not an even multiple of the 100 mil spacing of the other pins.